First of all, I want to join all the others in thanking you for the honesty and for the sharing.
I’m going to give a few of my views of this, as someone who has a fair amount of experience in “startup-land”. Some of this will be “criticism”, but please don’t take offense—it’s really hard to get these things right, and we all made and continue to make mistakes. And you seem to have gotten to some of these conclusions yourself—I’m writing this for the hypothetical other people who may want to start a startup, so making it general. Btw, really long comment, so sorry! :)
First of all, I’ll tell you what was by far the thing I miss most from your post—any talk about money. You’re building a for-profit company, and maybe I missed it, but I have no idea how you planned to make money off of this! I have no idea of the busines plan, at all. Even if making money isn’t really the goal here, unless you plan to live off donations, it should still be priority 1,2 and 3 for any company: You use money to solve most problems (pay to create content; pay to advertise; etc). You also use money as a good proxy for success. You also use money to fix problems like “burnout” by hiring people!
Secondly: I loved Inadequate Equilibria. But the whole “conversation about startups” was by far the weakest part of it, and the one part I think I actively disagreed with. (Also the part I know the most about: Gellmann amnesia anyone?) While I understand the concept of a grand vision, I think Eliezer and probably you are misunderstanding the idea of an MVP. Or at least, the way I think about it.
The idea is not, as Eliezer put it, to build a product that shows one specific workflow. For one thing, you don’t need to biuild a product. But more importantly, the emphasis is not on showing a complete workflow and seeing if people like it. The emphasis is on doing fast experiments. You need to figure out what assumptions you are making about what you’re trying to build, then test those assumptions. This is something you can often do with minimal work, by faking large parts of the product, for example.
One of the pushbacks to this view is that you might not know the assumptions, but that’s all the more reason to have fast experiments—you want to uncover which assumptions you’re making and don’t realize it, as soon as you can. If you think the only way to do this is to build a product over more than a year—you’re almost certainly wrong, except in very tech-heavy cases, which is not your situation.
In Arbital’s, some assumptions you had and could’ve tested:
You believed people will write content, for free. Easy to test—ask people to write it before the product.
You believed you had a superior flow for reading content. I’m still not sure I understand what that full flow was, but again, easy to test—ask Eliezer/someone to write content, and make a static html site with all the “reading” functionalty, but none of the editing capabilties. You could reasonably make whatever workflow you imagine the reading experience to be with a week’s worth of hand-coding html/css, or even a Wordpress site.
You believed you could get people interested in reading this material, and then doing… something? I’m not sure, since I didn’t understand the business plan. But let’s assume it’s “decide to read more material”. OK, easy to test—put one guide up, and ask people to sign up to a newsletter. Or donate money. Or something.
(I want to emphasize that, although I think I’m right, just the fact that Arbital failed doesn’t prove it. Building startups is hard and usually fails.)
Another issue that stems from lack of a business model—what kind of company were you trying to build? It seems pretty obvious, at least in retrospect, that this kind of company is a bad fit for a VC-funded startup. You are not trying to build somethign with minimal chance of success, but with the ability to become a billion-dollar company. I mean, I don’t think you were aiming for a billion dollar company.
But in that case, you should’ve never expected to raise money (and probably shouldn’t have raised money). And you should’ve made sure this is something that could be profitable relatively quickly, to continue supporting the development.
Lastly, I really got the sense from your post that you are all with a very engineering mindset, and very enamored by the beauty of a complex system, and by wanting to build something. Hell, you worked on this for a few years, wrote an entire post-mortem about it, and still I and others in this thread don’t even understand what you’re building! This is not a good sign—systems usually aren’t this complex, certainly not ones that are made to be used by actual people other than Eliezer :)
One more thing about community projects—we’re a community with a lot of developers. We see development projects everywhere. But the real strength of the community is not necessarily in that—if the bottom line thing we want, as a community, is more things like Eliezer-style explanation of hard concepts, that’s hard enough—we should make the journey to creating that content incredibly simple, and while that is arguably what Arbital was, I’d say that “let’s spend a few years to develop a new software platform” is a huge burden. Much better to use pre-existing stuff, IMO. Let’s make a rationality-Stack Exchange. Or a rational wiki (or not :) ). (Not to crticize too hard because I’m not that much in the community and don’t know the details, but I kind of wonder the same thing about LessWrong V2.0 - do we really need to rebuild forum software from scratch just for us? Is that really where we should be spending our community’s talent and efforts?).
To conclude: building starhtups is hard. Building consumer startups is much harder. Building consumer startups that are marketplaces is really really freakin hard. You tried and failed, which is a shame, but you seemed to have learned a lot from this, both about startups and other things (based on Inadequate Equilibria, I think Eliezer hasn’t learned the lessons I would’ve learned). So kudos for trying, kudos for putting yourself out there with this post, and in general, good job!
From what Eliezer wrote at the time he did think that it will create huge economic value and make massive profits. If a substantial number of people learn skills by reading on Arbital that would have allowed to make money by running ads and also in other ways.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, we definitely planned to make a lot of money. But I think the steps from what we were building to where we would be making money were too indirect / too far.
First of all, I want to join all the others in thanking you for the honesty and for the sharing.
I’m going to give a few of my views of this, as someone who has a fair amount of experience in “startup-land”. Some of this will be “criticism”, but please don’t take offense—it’s really hard to get these things right, and we all made and continue to make mistakes. And you seem to have gotten to some of these conclusions yourself—I’m writing this for the hypothetical other people who may want to start a startup, so making it general. Btw, really long comment, so sorry! :)
First of all, I’ll tell you what was by far the thing I miss most from your post—any talk about money. You’re building a for-profit company, and maybe I missed it, but I have no idea how you planned to make money off of this! I have no idea of the busines plan, at all. Even if making money isn’t really the goal here, unless you plan to live off donations, it should still be priority 1,2 and 3 for any company: You use money to solve most problems (pay to create content; pay to advertise; etc). You also use money as a good proxy for success. You also use money to fix problems like “burnout” by hiring people!
Secondly: I loved Inadequate Equilibria. But the whole “conversation about startups” was by far the weakest part of it, and the one part I think I actively disagreed with. (Also the part I know the most about: Gellmann amnesia anyone?) While I understand the concept of a grand vision, I think Eliezer and probably you are misunderstanding the idea of an MVP. Or at least, the way I think about it.
The idea is not, as Eliezer put it, to build a product that shows one specific workflow. For one thing, you don’t need to biuild a product. But more importantly, the emphasis is not on showing a complete workflow and seeing if people like it. The emphasis is on doing fast experiments. You need to figure out what assumptions you are making about what you’re trying to build, then test those assumptions. This is something you can often do with minimal work, by faking large parts of the product, for example.
One of the pushbacks to this view is that you might not know the assumptions, but that’s all the more reason to have fast experiments—you want to uncover which assumptions you’re making and don’t realize it, as soon as you can. If you think the only way to do this is to build a product over more than a year—you’re almost certainly wrong, except in very tech-heavy cases, which is not your situation.
In Arbital’s, some assumptions you had and could’ve tested:
You believed people will write content, for free. Easy to test—ask people to write it before the product.
You believed you had a superior flow for reading content. I’m still not sure I understand what that full flow was, but again, easy to test—ask Eliezer/someone to write content, and make a static html site with all the “reading” functionalty, but none of the editing capabilties. You could reasonably make whatever workflow you imagine the reading experience to be with a week’s worth of hand-coding html/css, or even a Wordpress site.
You believed you could get people interested in reading this material, and then doing… something? I’m not sure, since I didn’t understand the business plan. But let’s assume it’s “decide to read more material”. OK, easy to test—put one guide up, and ask people to sign up to a newsletter. Or donate money. Or something.
(I want to emphasize that, although I think I’m right, just the fact that Arbital failed doesn’t prove it. Building startups is hard and usually fails.)
Another issue that stems from lack of a business model—what kind of company were you trying to build? It seems pretty obvious, at least in retrospect, that this kind of company is a bad fit for a VC-funded startup. You are not trying to build somethign with minimal chance of success, but with the ability to become a billion-dollar company. I mean, I don’t think you were aiming for a billion dollar company.
But in that case, you should’ve never expected to raise money (and probably shouldn’t have raised money). And you should’ve made sure this is something that could be profitable relatively quickly, to continue supporting the development.
Lastly, I really got the sense from your post that you are all with a very engineering mindset, and very enamored by the beauty of a complex system, and by wanting to build something. Hell, you worked on this for a few years, wrote an entire post-mortem about it, and still I and others in this thread don’t even understand what you’re building! This is not a good sign—systems usually aren’t this complex, certainly not ones that are made to be used by actual people other than Eliezer :)
One more thing about community projects—we’re a community with a lot of developers. We see development projects everywhere. But the real strength of the community is not necessarily in that—if the bottom line thing we want, as a community, is more things like Eliezer-style explanation of hard concepts, that’s hard enough—we should make the journey to creating that content incredibly simple, and while that is arguably what Arbital was, I’d say that “let’s spend a few years to develop a new software platform” is a huge burden. Much better to use pre-existing stuff, IMO. Let’s make a rationality-Stack Exchange. Or a rational wiki (or not :) ). (Not to crticize too hard because I’m not that much in the community and don’t know the details, but I kind of wonder the same thing about LessWrong V2.0 - do we really need to rebuild forum software from scratch just for us? Is that really where we should be spending our community’s talent and efforts?).
To conclude: building starhtups is hard. Building consumer startups is much harder. Building consumer startups that are marketplaces is really really freakin hard. You tried and failed, which is a shame, but you seemed to have learned a lot from this, both about startups and other things (based on Inadequate Equilibria, I think Eliezer hasn’t learned the lessons I would’ve learned). So kudos for trying, kudos for putting yourself out there with this post, and in general, good job!
From what Eliezer wrote at the time he did think that it will create huge economic value and make massive profits. If a substantial number of people learn skills by reading on Arbital that would have allowed to make money by running ads and also in other ways.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, we definitely planned to make a lot of money. But I think the steps from what we were building to where we would be making money were too indirect / too far.
On a related note. a 55 page spec should not leave people basically in the dark.